Karlsruhe doesn't often make the shortlist of cities you'd expect a garage-rock uprising to spring from, but Wax Bird have never been much interested in doing things the expected way. "Heroes" opens their new EP like a door kicked off its hinges — three chords, a snarl, and a clarinet where you'd least expect one — and the effect is immediate: this is a band that plays as though the amplifiers might be repossessed by morning.

Leeds has a habit of producing bands who sound like they've spent a winter arguing about genre and lost, gloriously, on every front. Lomens are the latest case for the prosecution. Five old friends — Christopher Parker on vocals, Jordan McNamara on drums, Jason Glazebrook and Joshua Stevens trading guitar and bass duties, Thomas Nicholson filling the gaps with synth and percussion — have spent the past year building a debut EP that refuses to sit still, and "Surely Not?" is the moment that refusal pays off.

Every so often a single arrives that seems less interested in charming the listener than in putting them on trial. "Righteousness," the second instalment of OpCritical's oligarch trilogy, does exactly that, and does it with the sneering confidence of a band who know precisely which side of the barricade they're standing on.

Six years may have passed since "Gravitational Bull" first appeared, but the single loses none of its strange, cartoonish gravity on revisit. Released in June 2019 and animated in Berlin rather than filmed in some cramped Philly basement, the video is a far stranger beast than its title suggests — less bar-band swagger, more fever-dream fable, and all the better for it.

Steam pours from the ears of the girl on the sleeve, and by the second chorus you understand exactly why. "Bottle" arrives like a slammed cupboard door, all rattling nerves and chemical fizz, and Reetoxa treats restraint the way a shaken can treats a ring-pull.

Keith Welham and Cristabel Liu have spent eighteen months proving they don't do anything the easy way, and their debut album confirms it with a kind of stubborn, magnificent confidence. *The Last Food on Earth* is not a record that wants to be liked quickly. It wants to be lived with, the way a difficult relationship is lived with — which, given its subject matter, is rather the point.

Some comebacks announce themselves with a fanfare. Others creep up on you, quietly insistent, like a half-remembered melody hummed in the shower decades after you last sang it properly. Mister Chorister's "Spark" belongs firmly to the latter camp, and it's all the better for it.

There is something almost perversely honest about an artist who, when asked for a memorable quote about her work, simply replies: "I have no quote." In an era of relentlessly curated self-mythology, of musicians who arrive pre-packaged with manifestos and mood boards and carefully workshopped origin stories, G-STRING — the emerging rock project out of Bergamo, Italy — presents herself with a disarming, almost blunt sincerity. And then, rather brilliantly, she lets the music do the talking her words refuse to.

Some songs arrive fully clothed in ambition. You hear the opening bars and understand immediately that whoever made this was not content with half-measures. Chandra's audacious reimagining of Puccini's *Nessun Dorma* — timed with almost indecent precision to the opening salvos of FIFA World Cup 2026 — is precisely such a record: a work that could have collapsed under the weight of its own hubris, and instead stands tall, chest out, arms wide, daring you not to be moved.

The opening salvo is deceptive. "She was alone." Twice. Then a third time, the phrase circling back on itself like something that cannot be fully processed — a wound that keeps reopening the moment you look away.